On 18 Dec, 23:34, Duncan wrote:

These also stopped working when I was yesterday evening. The screens on
the Low Level platforms were just displaying 'listen to announcements
for details'.

They worked today, and now they say "Plaform zone" rather than "Zone"
which is an improvement. The voice announcer also says how many cars
the train has too. AND, you can now get realtime info from the Journey
Check service with STP as the station code.

Wow, things are improving (makes you wonder though how you could open
a brand new station and forget to get something like this to work
properly).

The whole station still seemed unfinished to me. I can't understand why
a lot of the retail units have still not been fitted out. If WHS and M&S
can manage by the opening, why are others struggling weeks later? At the
moment it hasn't got the feel of a shopping centre, which they were
aiming for, nor a station.

Having watched the crappy TV documentary that seemed to be more about
a few people who worked on the construction, then showed it in a
random order, the shops weren't built in time as the rest of the
station had to be opened for the Queen and to run Eurostar trains. The
"built on time and on budget" statement is ******** because it's far
from finished today and probably for a few more months.

The retailers are presumably rather upset about missing the Christmas
run-up too!

Personally I think there are too many fancy shops. Most of the
passengers there, e.g. domestic travellers, I'm sure will just want
snacks and something to read on the journey. Those retailers that have
been allowed in, such as WHSmith, have units far too small for the
number of passengers trying to use them.

I can see that when the station operator realises that people want
their Starbucks coffee and a cheap McDonald's, they'll stop this
"premium brand" idea and let them in. In fact, I put money on it
happening within a year or two. It might not be the best coffee or
food, but we went to a place before our Eurostar trip (a place that
does loads of different types of bread, forget the name) and the
service was slow and it was expensive. To be fair, it was very tasty
indeed and we had time to kill, but anyone wanting to grab some food
to go will not be satisfied at St Pancras!

Jonathan